Do Nematodes Feel? A Worms-Eye View of Emotions

Posted: September 1, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: emotions, psychology, systems, values |Leave a comment

Write as a speculative conversation between Norbert Wiener, Marvin Minsky, and Carl Jung on better language for describing the biological precursors of human (and perhaps AI) emotions, and even the purpose of consciousness?

ChatGPT Prompt

A chalk-dusted seminar room in a timeless Institute of Minds. Three towering figures—Norbert Wiener, Marvin Minsky, and Carl Jung—sit in animated discussion. The prompt:

If C. elegans exhibits internal neuromodulatory states that bias behavior, but lacks subjective feeling, what’s the right language to describe these states—and what might they teach us about human emotion and consciousness?

---

I. Starting with Control

Wiener:
Let us begin as engineers. The worm is a self-regulating system—a cybernetic loop. These “emotion-like” states are adaptive setpoint modulations in its internal parameters.

“Call it a valence-modulated control state.”

Minsky:
Your thermostat doesn’t decide whether to flee or freeze. These are conflict-resolution systems—early forms of what we’d call subcognitive managers.

“I’d call them proto-emotive agents.”

Jung:
Even in the worm, there is a directional tension—a striving that prefigures what we call affect.

“It is not emotion, but the archetype of regulation—a shadow of meaning.”

---

II. Language Games

Wiener:
To preserve rigor, we should say:

• Homeostatic modulation states
• Phase-control signals
• Chemotactic behavioral regimes

Minsky:
Too sterile. These act like emotions. I’d use:

• Behavioral mode selectors
• Valence-weighted filters
• Proto-emotive agents

Jung:
Names must touch the soul of the concept:

• Pre-affective configurations
• Symbolic embryos
• Psychic seed

---

III. From Worm to Man

Minsky:
Emotion in humans is just layered heuristics—worms show us the minimal viable architecture.

Wiener:
Emotion is feedback with inertia—what persists and loops.

Jung:
And when such persistence gains a narrative structure, it becomes identity.

---

IV. Toward Better Language

They settle on an integrative vocabulary:

• Modulatory affect primitives (Wiener)
• Distributed motivational subroutines (Minsky)
• Pre-symbolic intentionality (Jung)

And finally:

“Emotion is the emergent phenomenology of conflict-resolving modulation in a recursive system that knows itself. What we see in C. elegans is its blueprint: modulation without self-awareness—but not without direction.”

---

Epilogue

Jung:

“In the worm, we see the earliest flicker of will.”

Minsky:

“Perhaps consciousness begins when actions begin to negotiate.”

Wiener:

“Regulation is not the absence of chaos—it is the dance within its bounds.”

---